Balancing the “personal” and everything else when writing a script

The other day in response to this post, several solid comments from GITS readers: The Unknown Lyricist (“If it doesn’t matter to you, why write it?”), What (“film is a lot more dynamic than we give it credit for”), and Alex who’s been reading scripts for a film festival (“it’s hard to understate how essential it is to give people a reason to keep turning the pages”). I recommend checking out their comments in full.

Here are some other comments from Mike with two noteworthy references:

Writing one’s own story is a bigger factor than I think many of us appreciate. When you haven’t written your own story yet, your inner need to do so, bursting at the seams, can and often will intrude upon whatever else you might be writing.

Author and teacher Roger MacBride Allen once wrote, “One of my students brought every one of his stories to a screeching halt with an off-the-point diatribe railing against the government for forcing psychotics to take mood-altering drugs. I told him if he was that interested in that subject, he should write a story about that subject, and get it out of his system, rather than injecting it into his otherwise good stories on wholly different topics.”

Similarly, in her lecture collection “The Art of Fiction,” Ayn Rand taught that a writer stands naked spiritually before the world — that a writer exerting the utmost effort to produce excellent text will be powerless to prevent his own beliefs, superstitions, prejudices, and internalized contradictions from coming through in his writing. So if he is writing something he doesn’t believe, the reader will know it and immersion/interest will be broken.

Kind of has ominous implications for all those screenwriters who come up with the most gruesome torture porn, doesn’t it?

Which led me to write this:

I suppose in an ideal world, a writer attempting to draft something with commercial appeal will start with a strong story concept in a mainstream genre, understand screenplay structure well enough to round the story into good shape, but always be mindful of where they connect personally with the material, especially how that plays out in their treatment of the characters.

More and more, I’ve come to believe in the importance of creating an emotional experience when we write our stories. Script readers, producers, studio execs, agents, managers, they all read so much, they become rather ‘dulled’ by the script review process. A story that grabs them emotionally can really cut through the morass of material.

And by emotion, I don’t mean make readers weep, although depending upon the story, that can be a good thing. I mean if it’s a comedy, make them laugh their asses off. If it’s a horror, scare the crap out of them. Thriller, keep them on the edge of their seats.

Yet for all that, it can’t just be about emotion, and it can’t just be personal. As noted above, a commercially viable screenplay should have a strong story concept, hang together with a solid structure, and be populated with compelling multifaceted characters.

There’s a balance. But definitely we should always strive to bring something personal to what we write. That not only can help to make the story unique, but also lift the words up off the pages and into ‘life.’

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